Archive: 2016

Festival Archive

2016

HIGHLIGHTS

The eighth annual Boston Book Festival took place on October 14-15, 2016. Even before things got “officially” underway, we were thrilled to partner with Boston’s Literary District and other literary organizations to put on the first (annual!) Lit Crawl on the Thursday before the BBF, featuring readings, performances, and literary games hosted in unconventional spaces throughout Back Bay. We kicked off the official festivities Friday evening with a lively session featuring novelists Emma Donoghue, Maria Semple, and Tom Perrotta talking about making the leap to screenwriting and back to writing fiction, hosted by WBUR’s always-sparkling Robin Young.

BBF Saturday dawned clear and bright, a beautiful New England fall day. Close to 30,000 attendees flocked to Copley Square, packing close to twenty venues for more than seventy-five separate events. We were thrilled to be back in the newly-renovated Boston Public Library, whose impressive Shakespeare Unauthorized exhibit opened just in time for the BBF. We also were pleased to welcome Goethe-Institut Boston as a programming partner; they hosted two sessions at their beautiful space on Beacon Street.

Elsewhere at the BBF, topical sessions on women’s issues and on injustice, as well as a lively discussion on the 2016 election, drew large crowds, as did a special event, The Book Revue, featuring authors like Faith Salie and Richard Russo in entertaining performances. We welcomed sessions developed by the Mystery Writers of America, Boston’s Literary District, Independent Publishers of New England, and Commonwealth eBook Collections, as well as three community-developed BBF Unbound sessions on topics ranging from romance fiction to food in fiction.

Outdoors, our 70+ exhibitor booths featured representatives from small presses, bookstores, literary nonprofits, films, retailers, and MFA programs, as well as BBF’s sponsors, including Presenting Partner WBUR. Tour guides from Boston By Foot led history buffs on walking tours through the literary history of the Back Bay, two talented poets offered free custom poems on the spot, and Berklee College of Music students kept things grooving with a series of performances on the outdoor stage.

In addition to The Book Revue, attendees could wrap up their BBF day with a beverage and some verse at the annual Poems & Pints poetry readings or with a sold-out performance of the podcast Lore (soon to be a series from Amazon Video). Lore’s spooky storytelling offered the perfect capstone to the BBF and a lead-in to the Halloween season. Thanks to everyone who joined us at BBF 2016–we’ll see you next year!

2016 AUDIO

Archival audio recordings are available for the following additional sessions from BBF 2016:

(Note: clicking the title of a session will play the audio file in a new window. To download the file to your hard drive, right-click (PC) or ctrl-click (Mac) and select “Download linked file” from the menu that appears.)